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> Tech sufferers greatly from a "God Complex" syndrome, and it's exactly what will prevent it from getting better. Even the largest social platforms are not insulated from bad leadership being accountable, and frankly, that's the reason why things really die a slow death these days.

I think I know what you mean, though I typically frame it almost like they have an Anti-god problem. Big tech leaders are often explicitly trying to avoid passing moral or ethical judgment, so instead rely on "data" or "numbers." What a lot of the "I-follow-data" cultists seem not to realize is that "data" is basically inherently meaningless per se, thus decision-making based on data alone builds interpretive value judgments into the decision rule being used. It also invites fanatics to start producing manipulated/biased/tendentious "data" that appears to be some impartial metric, but is in fact just veiled motivated reasoning exploited to drive an agenda.

Facebook and Google appear to have followed this to its logical extent, allowing literal algorithms to make decisions "based on data." So has Twitter, though Twitter's system is probably even more dysfunctional.

At least when God damns you, you can argue your case and be presented with the evidence and know who to complain to. Tech damnation involves receiving a vaguely-worded message about polices or "community guidelines" being violated (per some unknown interpretation), or no reason at all. You have no recourse or chance to argue your case, even though many times the damnation was an error.

I have ample evidence of tech companies passing judgement and punishing people for things I often can't even understand.

Despite the rumors, so far I have not seen or even heard of any evidence of a god doing that. Maybe gods need to get a "Tech Complex."

Why does "justice" as a concept exist? How did it evolve? Where is the advantage in it? After all, in non-human species, the runt of the litter tends to die.

I have ample evidence that all humans are deeply concerned with this concept, however different their conceptions may be; yet I have seen or heard no evidence that could plausibly explain why it helped sustain us as a species.

There are plenty of folks who have studied this on biology and sociology.. this looks like a decent jump off point:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_morality#Primat...

Tho I'd look beyond, towards reciprocity and deception detection in other animals as well

Really? I can’t believe it needs to be said, but perhaps justice is about transcending the rules of mere sustainability.

I’ve always been curious about this course. Maybe this thread will lead me to watch it. https://justiceharvard.org/

In my experience, big tech leaders are cowards and hide behind “data” to justify whatever actions they’re looking to take. I’ve watched as teams of “tech leaders” wait and massage “the data” until the data fits the narrative they’re trying to push.

I’ll say it again: these are the actions of cowards. I’m ashamed these people are by default charting humanity’s course.

> Tech sufferers greatly from a "God Complex" syndrome, and it's exactly what will prevent it from getting better.

I saw an excellent critique of Roblox the other day, which covered many aspects of their business and different kinds of abuse which are happening in and around their game.

The most bizarre part was that they sent some questions to the company - and the company responded by saying they “clearly weren’t being objective” and essentially gaslighting the people making the video.

I think the people in charge of Roblox seriously don’t see themselves as holding any sort of responsibility to the broader society that pays their bills. It’s like someone watched The Corporation and thought - “oh companies can get away with sociopathic behaviour? I want in!”. Doing harm to the world in the name of your bottom line doesn’t make you clever. It makes you the villain.

(Video in question: https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY )

What's weird is no one really notices/cares about this type of behavior. I sometimes wonder if this is seen as a feature: institutional sociopathy shields powerful sociopathic people from their consequences.

A few possibilities:

* people generally cannot discern moral realities within complex systems, instead preferring simpler narratives ("he made a lot of money, he must be a decent chap")

* people can see it on occasion, but insist that the problem is the single bad actor rather than the system enabling them

* people realize they can't do much about it, as they're implicitly bound up in this system run amok

Yeah I’m puzzled why people don’t seem to care too. I think it’s mostly the third - complaining about companies acting malevolently is boring like climate change. Most people would rather not think about it.

At the companies themselves, I blame the C suite entirely. It’s a leadership problem. What is the vision for your company? Why do we all get out of bed in the morning? If the goal is to make the world better, then concerns about how your business is impacting the world would matter. But having a goal to simply to enrich the founders (which seems to be the case with most tech companies), is like making an entire car just so you can drive to the gas station.

Companies like Twitter and Roblox change the world by their very presence. It’s shameful to waste that capacity by not making the world better in the process.

Well, for public-traded companies, anyone in the C suite caught doing that would be fired, so it's not a mystery that they don't...

That’s simply not true. CEOs can and do argue for value based decision making in plenty of companies. Plenty of boards support them in this. Values alignment, “knowing your why”, acting with integrity - these are the qualities that help your company still be around in 100 years time.

Even if you want to make the most money possible, you usually won’t get there by screwing over your employees and customers.

I don't think a broader society pays their bills; their customers do.

"Broader society" is not a real entity; it's just a term to denote, presumably, the entire planet's population, given Roblox is not limited to a single country.

Pretty sure that's a metaphor ? There are pre-requisite conditions for Roblox to exist, and their actions are endangering those.

People make fun of the "we live in a society" "insight" - sadly it would seem that capitalism has gone so far, that even this is being forgotten now.

I don't know who "people" are here - I'm certainly not making fun of that.

Why I'm critiquing is for the same reason I mention your "people" silliness: massive overgeneralisations are sloppy and lead to wrong conclusions.

I saw part of that video the other day and what you and the guy in the video are saying is absurd. This guy is all butthurt that Roblox can't monitor and ban people for what goes on in Discord chats. How and why would anyone expect Roblox to enforce it or even care what happens off of their platform?

They shut the official forums down to not have to deal with moderation, they created the issue of third party communities

That's fine. They don't need to offer that service.

I’d have no problem if that was their stance. “Hey, we know about the abuse happening in the broader game development communities and we want to help, but we can’t control what happens on discord”. But that’s not their stance. They seem to be pretending nothing bad ever happens, and also (for some reason) running a stock market for children over Roblox items with extortionate profit taking on their end.

I don’t expect them to fix everything overnight. But there’s plenty they could do, if they weren’t too busy gaslighting and ignoring any criticism of their platform.

> Since I decided to just bolster my own site, I get reliable growth, and metrics...

Since you don’t have social media anymore (or at least Twitter), how do you get new traffic to your site? All via search engines?

I still have those old social media accounts, now they serve to drive content to my site (the primary focal point of content I create) though... I make full music videos for my site, and then cut smaller snippets of it to post as I can on social sites, which makes my life a lot easier.

I wonder what fraction of traffic these days is from nor search engines, neither social media ?

I question whether reddit has shadow banned one of my accounts. I post regularly to both and one has about 10k karma and the other seems stuck at 2k. I do get the occasional like but never anything substantial and it makes me wonder if they are severely limiting how many people see my posts. I could just be imagining it but with the thought of shadow band it had me wondering. I couldn’t remember my password so on a separate computer I made a new account and hope to stay logged in on the first one so I don’t lose it is why I am using 2 accounts.

YouTube can shadowban your comments just because you used (more than one ?) timestamp "links" for the same video !

Everybody is doing that. Even here on the HN you'll get shadow banned - couple of weeks ago whole thread that someone else started just disappeared. I become aware of that only when searching for my own message from that thread. It was semi-controversial issue but nothing in that thread (at least at the time I saw its content for the last time) warranted that. Basically what I'm seeing as a HN is just a view that someone else curates.

Have you considered that people might just not find you particularly interesting?

Nope.